Tracking give aways and take aways in the VHL

[studentized 166]

Although the STHS index has fields to track take aways and give aways, the version of STHS we sim on does not actually fill anything in. Still, as pointed out by my teammates on New York, the full play by play game logs contain enough information to reasonably calculate these. So that's what I did. I will briefly outline how I went from full play by play to numeric stats but full disclaimer: it's probably not perfect. I can even post the source code if people are interested in building on it (otherwise I will probably just keep generating these on demand for my teammates when they want it).

 

How I got the results:

 

The game files are all served as html so that's what I parsed from. For any one wanting to try, it wasn't too painful thanks to some handy packages in nodejs. From the full play-by-play, only two sentence "templates" stood out to me as describing a give away/take away. I wouldn't be surprised if I missed some though, so let me know if you know of any others. They are:

 

1. "Pass by Player A intercepted by Player B (in the neutral/teamX/teamY zone)" and
2. "Player A is hit by Player B and loses puck"

 

The first one is pretty cut and dry. Player A gets credited with a give away and Player B gets a take away. I interpreted the second sentence type in pretty much the same way (i.e Player A with give away and Player B with take away). In reality though, the second case could have Player A lose the puck, but in the following sentence have the "Puck retrieved by a Player C" where Player C is on the same team. In this case, I'm not sure that a give away is truly appropriate, but I was feeling lazy so I didn't go to this level. If it makes you feel better, the first type (intercepted passes) is much more common that the latter, so I think the results would be pretty close.

 

One thing I noticed right off the bat is that give aways and take aways are being reported MUCH higher than NHL levels (like an order of 10x more). Perhaps this is the reason that SHTS is not tracking them in our version of the sim. Or perhaps I just interpreted everything too aggressively. Thankfully, I think most people are concerned with their TA to GA ratio rather than the absolute numbers anyways, so I'm still thinking there is some usefulness here.

 

The results (for season 68 up to game 251):

 

Most take aways: Piotr Jerwa @majesiu - 1014
(runner up Sven Hitz @JayF - 1011)

 

Most give aways: Mikko Aaltonen @GRZ - 959
(runner up Guy LeGrande @Steve - 948)

 

Most take aways in a game: Brady Strokpo Jr @Bushito- 41 take aways in game 241

 

Most give aways in a game: Lance Flowers @CowboyinAmerica - 39 give aways in game 190

 

Best take away to give away ratio:  Mikka Pajari @Devise - 177 TA to 94 GA = 1.88 TA:GA

Best take away to give away ratio (min 800 GA + TA): Basaraba Moose @Toasty - 636 TA to 377 GA = 1.68 TA:GA

 

Worst take away to give away ratio: Chico Smeb @xDParK - 193 TA to 425 GA = 0.45 TA:GA

Worst take away to give away ratio (min 800 GA + TA): Mikko Aaltonen - 553 TA to 959 GA = 0.58 TA:GA

 

Next steps:

 

Besides just cleaning up the code a bit, one interesting next step (and possibly an upcoming VHL.com article) is to try to associate each player in each game to their team at that time. This will let me easily figure out which teams are the best in regards to TA/GA as well as make it easier to generate all the player results for a specific team. I could also take this a step further and scrape the line combos and assess performance of lines using TA/GA. An easier next step would be to generate this report for the VHLM since they need some love too. As always, let me know if you have any ideas of other things you'd like to see.

 

Thanks for reading!

[Enorama 1,980]

Make sure you help out the award committee this year  

 

 

[Elmebeck 378]

How much does the give/take away ratio mean when it's about a fifth of those who actually get ice time and handle the puck, one wonders.

[Gustav 6,093]

1 hour ago, studentized said:

One thing I noticed right off the bat is that give aways and take aways are being reported MUCH higher than NHL levels (like an order of 10x more). Perhaps this is the reason that SHTS is not tracking them in our version of the sim. Or perhaps I just interpreted everything too aggressively.

If you read the full play by play of a game (like I did a couple times when I was new), there are a TON of giveaways and takeaways. You're doing it right, for sure.

 

Also stop writing better articles than mine dammit

[ThePerfectNut 563]

Damn this is fireHe should have a page for his own to do this for the league and get paid

[majesiu 58]

I'm good then, plz gib award

[JayF 10]

99 checking build is the new meta, over 1k takeaways with under 400 TPE